Staten Island Man Is Accused of Planting Bombs to Stop a Wedding

By VIVIAN YEE

September 19, 2013

The little girl first came into Omar Duran’s life as a baby. As the years went by, Mr. Duran, 54, who lived above her and her mother in a tidy brick apartment house on Staten Island, watched her grow, played with her and taught her to ride her first bike.

By the time the girl turned 10, her mother was ready for new things: she had passed an exam to become a nurse’s aide, and she was getting ready to marry her fiancé, neighbors said. And Mr. Duran, who lived alone and thought of himself as a surrogate father to the girl, grew desperate, the authorities said.

For months, they said, Mr. Duran had been muttering jealously about Juan Cruz, who married the woman, 32, on Saturday and moved in.

This month, Staten Islanders were repeatedly shaken by reports of bombs found on their quiet streets. One, found on Sept. 2, was behind a strip mall. Another was discovered 10 days later by a pedestrian. Two days after that, a third was picked up by a sanitation crew in a pile of garbage bags.

Prosecutors said they were not wired to detonate, but the last two contained enough explosive material to cause serious injury if ignited. All three bore a note in Spanish with the name Juan Cruz and a nearby address.

Mr. Duran, a custodian, was questioned on Wednesday after the police traced a car to him from surveillance camera images near one bomb site. In Staten Island Criminal Court on Thursday, he pleaded not guilty to placing a fake bomb, several counts of criminal possession of a weapon and reckless endangerment. A judge set bail at $500,000 and ordered him not to contact the woman, her husband or her daughter.

Describing Mr. Duran’s relationship to the woman as “family friend,” Assistant District Attorney Biju Koshy said in court that Mr. Duran had confessed to planting the bombs. The first device was an “imitation,” Mr. Koshy said, but the others included propane tanks, computer wires and a clock. At least one device carried Mr. Duran’s fingerprints.

Police officials said Mr. Duran had worried that Mr. Cruz would supplant him as a father figure. His grudge had already led him to make several anonymous calls to the Department of Homeland Security, sharing false tips about Mr. Cruz’s supposedly illegal activities, Mr. Koshy said. But as the wedding day approached, Mr. Duran — an occasional handyman neighbors saw sprucing up the house and building a backyard gazebo — took more drastic measures, rigging crude bombs to frame Mr. Cruz, the authorities said.

It was “all in an attempt to interrupt the wedding plans of the young woman,” Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner, said.

To the neighbors, Mr. Duran’s calling himself a “father figure” to the girl was no fantasy. Residents of the four-apartment brick house seemed to be all part of “one big happy family,” said Charlie DeFilipo, 45, who works at the gas station and auto repair shop next door.

Barbecuing and relaxing in the backyard, Mr. Duran, the woman, her daughter and her mother seemed to be on easy, affectionate terms — so much so that some neighbors thought he was the woman’s father or her brother, Mr. DeFilipo said. The balding Mr. Duran, his head ringed with a graying fringe, taught the young girl how to ride a bike, neighbors said; he sometimes drove the mother and daughter to their Seventh-day Adventist church.

On his own, Mr. Duran was friendly and helpful, the kind of neighbor who would shovel your driveway after a snowstorm without being asked, said Jimmy Albunio, 83, whose backyard abuts that of the brick house. “I never would’ve thought that this would happen,” Mr. Albunio said.

On a modest block with several families who have lived there for decades, the house where Mr. Duran lived — with its immigrant families and relatively transient renters — was something of an oddity. Mr. Duran and the woman, whose name the authorities did not release, had both lived there about a decade, neighbors said, and the girl’s biological father sometimes visited. The woman supported herself in part by baby-sitting for a neighbor, Eddie Roman, 48, said.

Just a few days ago, Mr. Cruz had begun moving in. But by Wednesday night, the house was cordoned off with yellow police tape.